Pages

Monday, 30 September 2013

The Flash 500 server has been
down on and off for the last two days. This means many people would not
have been able to send in entries.

Some were fortunate
enough to get online at a time when the server was up and running, but
the email system wasn't working properly and (although we received
emails) we were unable to reply.

We have now been
promised by the service provider that all issues have been resolved.
However, if anyone managed to get through and submit an entry, but
hasn't received a thank you email in response to your payment and entry,
please let us know so that we can acknowledge receipt.

For those of you who were unable to get through, there are still a few hours left to enter. The Flash Fiction and Humour Verse competitions both close tonight (30th September) at midnight UK time.

Thursday, 26 September 2013

Cathy, who writes from Edinburgh, is more than a bit fed
up with receiving form rejections. She says: I spend a fortune on postage following agents’ guidelines to the
letter. So many of them still insist on paper submissions. God knows why in
this day and age, but they do. Not that they reply by post. Oh no, if they
reply at all, it’s usually via a form email! I often feel like sending an email
in return asking for some feedback in exchange for what it’s cost me to send my
work to them, but I manage to stop myself because I know it won’t do me any
good. However, just recently I’m finding it really hard to keep my emotions in
check. Bloody agents seem to have everything their own way. Most of them don’t
even have the decency to tell us why they don’t want the work on offer. I bet
some of them don’t even read half the stuff they receive. Sometimes I just want
to lash out and tell those agents how bloody rude they are. I bet they wouldn’t
like to be treated as they treat writers. I know I’m not the only one who feels
like this. Loads of my writing friends say the same.

Dealing with rejection is hard. But it is part and parcel of
being a writer. I doubt there is a published author anywhere on the planet who
hasn’t had work rejected at some point in his or her career. A certain Mr S.
King, who is one of the most successful novelists of our age, claims he was
once able to paper a room with his rejection slips. So, when you receive a ‘no
thank you’ slip, you’re in good company.

It’s what you do after rejection that is important for your
future career. If your manuscript comes back with a form letter saying it isn’t
right for a list, you need to look critically at how and why you chose that
publisher or agent in the first place. If your subject matter isn’t suitable,
then you've wasted their time, and a fair amount of your hard-earned cash in
ink, paper and postage.

If you’ve researched properly, but still receive a ‘not
right for our list’ letter, although it’s hard, you have to accept it and move
on. Agents and publishers receive huge volumes of material every week and
sometimes work is rejected without being read. It happens; as writers we have
to be thick-skinned and get over it.

Any pointers as to why the manuscript failed to make the
grade should be acted on. Agents and publishers are busy people. It is very
rare for anyone to take the time to tell you what’s wrong with your work, so
treat this information with respect and revise accordingly.

Whatever you do, don’t fire off an angry letter, or email.
Your work was rejected – end of story (excuse the pun). Venting your spleen won’t change anyone’s mind,
but might make you a powerful enemy in an industry where word rapidly spreads.

Wednesday, 18 September 2013

Trevor from Leeds wants to use clichés because he feels they
do the job. He asks: are clichés really
that bad? My writing group members are forever banging on about them, but
sometimes they get across exactly what I want to say.

Yes, they clichés really are that bad. They are phrases that
were once fresh and new, but are now stale and tired. To make your writing
stand out and bring your own unique voice to life, you need to create your own
original expressions. The words and phrases you use have to help flesh out your
characters and also make the narrative sparkle.

You might well have a character speaking in clichés and
there is nothing wrong with that. You’d be using it as a character quirk. But
if the narrative is littered with clichés, or more than one character uses
them, that is a sign of lazy writing.

Be bold – create your own similes and metaphors. You never
know, in years to come your phrases might be so frequently used that they will
be classed as clichés. After all, when Shakespeare and all the other great
writers wrote what are now considered clichés, they were then original and
fresh. It’s because they so exactly fitted the characters and situations that
the phrases have been used over and over again.

As a writer, it’s your job to use words to the best effect.
This means being innovative and allowing your voice to come through via your
use of words.

Tuesday, 17 September 2013

I don't very often mention my other persona,
Frances di Plino, on this blog, but when something amazing happens, I
can't keep it to myself. Bad Moon Rising has been nominated for an award and I need your help.

The People’s Book
Prize

Founded by Dame Beryl Bainbridge DBE, the People’s Book
Prize is decided entirely on readers’ votes. I’m delighted to say that Bad Moon Rising has been nominated in
the fiction category, but it’s up against some stiff competition, not least being
the great Frederick Forsyth’s latest offering!

You can vote for Bad
Moon Rising if you’ve read and enjoyed the novel. If you haven’t read it,
now’s a good time to point out you can do so for the paltry sum of 77p/99c on Amazon
Kindle. (All Crooked Cat Publishing's books are on sale this week, including the next in the series, Someday Never Comes.)

I hate begging for favours, but I think the only way Bad Moon Rising is going to make the
final is if lots of you vote – so, here goes: please, please, please vote for
my book by following the link below.

To give you a flavour of the novel, it has garnered 22
five-star, 6 four-star and 1 one-star reviews so far.

Here’s the latest:

“As an enthusiastic
detective fan, I was not disappointed by this book. The reader is kept guessing
all the way through as to the identity of the killer even though his motives
are left in no doubt. What I found troubling was that I was taken into the mind
of the serial killer and understood it, not a pleasant trip. The twist in the
end was satisfying even if I did want to slap Paolo at times and ask him to
wake up in his personal life. Characters were believable and not too overdrawn.
I can't wait to read the next in this series.”

Wednesday, 11 September 2013

It all began with my memoir, Chickens, Mules and Two Old Fools. To my astonishment, that became
an Amazon bestseller, so I wrote the sequels, the latest of which hit the New
York Times bestseller list.

What made you choose
to write about your experiences?

Life in a tiny Spanish mountain village brings surprises
every day, some hilarious, some sad. I keep a diary and soon realised I had
enough material for a book, then another and another. Also, the villagers gave
me their delicious recipes which I have included in the books.

How long does it take
you to write a book?

It takes me between one and two years to finish a book.

What is your work
schedule like when you're writing?

Sporadic. I tend to write in flashes depending on what is
going on around me. During village fiesta time not a word gets written.

Where do you get your
ideas for your books?

I don't need ideas, I just record what is going on around me.
Village life is so rich and colourful, there is always a story to tell.

How old were you when
you knew you wanted to write and what was your first attempt?

I can trace it back to the age of about 6 or 7, when I wrote
my first *coughs* masterpiece. It was called ‘The Runaway Tabel’. It went
something like this: ‘Wunce there was a runaway tabel and wen you put food on
it it ran away. The end.’ But I guess everybody has to start somewhere…

What do you like to
do when you're not writing?

Relaxing in the sunshine with a good book, drooling over my
granddaughter, sampling the local food and wine and looking after our chickens.

What was one of the
most surprising things you learned in creating your books?

In late middle age, I discovered that people actually wanted
to read the stuff I wrote!

How many books have
you written?

Five and a half.

Which is your
favourite and why?

I have a soft spot for Two
Old Fools on a Camel because that one hit the NYT bestseller list and
resulted in enquiries from big publishers.

As a child, what did
you want to do when you grew up?

I wanted to be a zoo keeper. I guess there’s still time...

What are you working
on now?

I'm working on the fourth in the Old Fools series.

Bio

Victoria Twead is a New York Times bestselling author. In
2004 she nagged poor, long-suffering Joe into leaving Britain and relocating to
a tiny, remote mountain village in Andalucía, where they became reluctant
chicken farmers and owned the most dangerous cockerel in Spain. Village life
inspired Victoria’s first book, Chickens,
Mules and Two Old Fools, which was quickly followed by two more in the Old
Fools series, all of which fast became Amazon bestsellers.

Friday, 6 September 2013

What genre would you
say your novels fall into, or do they defy classification?

Technically they fall into the Fantasy category, but not the
‘hard fantasy’ wizards-and-elves sort of fantasy.I suppose you could call my stuff magical realism,
though it can be pretty far out too.I
like to explore shifted realities, dream realities, nightmares, fever,
nostalgia, and try and do things that haven’t really been tried before.

Kaleidoscope
itself starts off as dystopian science fiction, but it becomes something much
darker and more tied into the subconscious as the book progresses.

What made you choose
that genre?

A combination of escapism and impatience.I’ve always looked to fiction to transport me
from the mundanities of everyday life, rather than necessarily reflect it back at
me.That’s not to say that the best
escapist fiction doesn’t have profound things to say about our lives and the
world we live in, but it’s nice also to get away from what you’re doing for a
while.Of course, this is what I do all
day, so I run the risk of becoming a crazy hermit man-child from lack of
exposure to reality.I’ll let others be
the judge of whether that’s already happened.

I’m not really one to sit still for long – I’d find it hard,
I think, to write an entire novel tied to a single genre.Kaleidoscope
is an appropriate title, because it’s a pretty kaleidoscopic mix of science
fiction, fantasy, post-modernism, comedy, surrealism, adventure, satire and a
dash of horror.The trick is finding
tonal consistency, so that it all feels like it belongs in the same world and
the same story, rather than a chaotic mishmash.

How long does it take
you to write a book?

I’m primarily a screenwriter, and the books are something I
do in between, so it’s hard to really tell how long they’ve taken in real
time.Kaleidoscope
spans a few years, but not very concentrated years – which, I think, has helped
keep it fresh.I never reached the stage
of getting burnt out with it.

Now they’re getting published, though, I have the impetus to
ramp up the pace a little!

What is your work
schedule like when you're writing?

I don’t really have one, which probably isn’t healthy.Much of my day is Adam vs. Insomnia, or Adam
vs. Procrastination.I’m normally writing,
or trying to write, pretty much from the moment I get up to the moment I go to
bed, which is why I have so many friends.

Where do you get your
ideas for your books?

This is traditionally the big unanswerable question, isn’t
it?For me, it varies from book to book
– with Kaleidoscope,
I started off with a sense of the environment, a huge shopping centre in which
everyone lives and no one ever goes outside, and they’re so hypersensitive
they’ve become phobic of everything.On
top of this, about twenty years ago, Milton Keynes shopping centre had its own
pub, which meant that this one part of the centre could be a bit of a no-go
area at certain times of day.It amused
me that a shopping centre could have a rough part of town – so that’s where the
nightmarish Outer Zones came from.

When did you write
your first book and how old were you?

My school friend Peter and I wrote a Tolkien-inspired Fantasy
epic called The Adventures Of Drinil when
we were 11/12, about some little people called Lidils (not Hobbits) who go on
an adventure and fight orcs.

We were somewhere in our teens when we wrote a massive
illustrated surrealist novel called The
Secret Onion.It’s still probably
the oddest thing we’ve written, Peter was some kind of precocious genius I
think, his bits still really stand up today.How many other 16-year-olds would come up with a complex series of
fractal, synaesthetic alchemical worlds based around the vowels in the chapter
headings?

What do you like to
do when you're not writing?

I’m a bit of a movie buff.Last night I watched Silent
Running, the old Douglas Trumbull ecological science fiction film from the
early ‘70s.What a glum little film that
is!The two films I always try and
persuade people to watch are the Monkees movie Head, which is a lot darker and weirder than one might expect; and
French Magical Realism classic, Celine
& Julie Go Boating.Also, on
behalf of my cover artist Evelyn and I, everyone must watch Tarsem Singh’s The Fall – you’ll never see anything
else like it.

I’m also pretty heavily into music. I have a non-career as a songwriter and
musician, which I had to jettison in order not to take too much attention away
from my writing.I’m a sucker for
melody, hence my love of 60s/70s guitar pop-rock.

What was one of the
most surprising things you learned in creating your books?

Perhaps that everything they taught me about creative
writing at school is wrong – in fact, you have to strip out those excess adjectives
and adverbs, be sparing with ‘said bookisms’, keep it clean and simple.

How many books have
you written?

Not including those teenage noodlings, two complete novels,
plus another four currently on the go.

Which is your
favourite and why?

Blinsby, which is the
first of a sequence of four books.It’s
such a personal novel; it’s a fictionalised memoir by Peter and I of our time
at primary school.But it’s so
fictionalised that nothing in the book actually happened in real life!The story is about a new boy who starts at
school, apparently discovers a dark secret being kept by the school
authorities, and is disappeared.Erasmus
and Frank (based on Peter and I) set about investigating, and uncover layer
upon layer of deceit and betrayal.

It has a similarly kaleidoscopic mishmash of genres – it’s
ostensibly an adventure romp, but with quite a darkly nightmarish surrealist
element, plus comedy, satire, thriller, etc.I’m also fascinated by the notion of it being a children’s book for
adults… I love the idea of transporting the reader back to their school days in
a genuinely immersive way.We’ve created
quite a detailed alternate version of 1980s pop culture and a fully-populated
school environment; and the book follows a complete school day in heightened real
time, so hopefully it feels like you’re really there.We use the Calvin & Hobbes technique of
having children express themselves in exaggeratedly articulate fashion – they
don’t think like adults, but they have the articulacy of adults – which I think
helps adults identify with them.

As a child, what did
you want to do when you grew up?

I was always in denial about growing up (and still am, I
suppose), so it was never more than my pre-prepared answer to that most
standard of grown-ups’ questions.The
whole notion of being old and having a job seemed pretty theoretical.It was originally teacher, because that’s all
I really knew, and I liked the idea of setting the work rather than having to
do it.I also fancied being costume
designer on Doctor Who, till a friend told me that you had to be a woman, which
put paid to that.I did want to be a Doctor
Who companion, too.Not an actor, just a
Doctor Who companion.

What are you working
on now?

Various top secret film projects, plus the second book in
the Blinsby series.